NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

SAFE PASSAGE is Joanna Ezekiel's second poetry booklet. This slim collection contains fifteen poems, one poem per page, apart from two longer poems.

This is a journey through space and time: reshaped, re-aligned, clarified, distorted even, by the power of the imagination and in the service of a particularized reality that art creates. The journey inevitably leads to exploration of self.

It is a journey across cultures as Ezekiel writes from a Jewish background, as we see in LIVING IN BETHNALL GREEN, where the writer visits the town that her great-grandmother fled to from Kiev:

	Here, my footsteps echo,
	my back straightens.
	I walk tall,

	give daily thanks
	for this, her hard-won
	safe passage.

	. . .stand
	in the cool white space
	between watercolour
	and brushworked letters

	. . . the high walls
	and corridors of white noise
	of my life in London.

	to be stepping off that ferry
	at the edge of Britain.

Many of the most moving and compelling poems in SAFE PASSAGE deal with the experience of recalling the past. In the wonderful poem GRANDFATHER, the poet delves into family history:

	In 1914, at twentthree years old, my grandfather
	decides to join up, it might be Isaac or Morrie
	from shul who nudges my grandfather in the queue.

	. . . wax tears weep
	the outline of India
	onto the white lace tablecloth,
	both flames bouncing
	sideways, up, sideways, up,
	as if punched, each heart
	a steady bruise.

	hard HB pencils
	he sharpens with a knife
	almost to four corners

	Closer to God
	than the rest of our family,
	my Uncle Alec
	would speak to Elijah
	at shul, each year,
	asking a favour.

	To act as the teacher,
	the meetings, the jargon,
	the fixed breaks, the judgements.
	A blaze of demands
	from children, parents, staff
	smoke through each evening,
	curl and uncurl in my head.

	Our father Neptune banged his stave three times:
	the notes our throats made, long as ropes,
	pulled the city under — if we'd refused,
	we'd have been sent to try our luck on land.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that Ezekiel writes only about her family and the past, just as it is also wrong to suggest that these two important preoccupations could be separated out from the works. The immediate wrench one experiences when reading Ezekiel's poetry derives from the way in which the voice seems always to listen to and register bodily experience. Her range and treatment of her subjects in this slim volume are impressive, covering both the history of her Jewish family, intense childhood recollections, her journey through life, and more besides. Some of the most memorable poems, such as the haunting poems THIS LONG JOURNEY and THE BRIGHTON TRAIN, deal with her experiences of putting herself "in the past tense" and pouring "over the words on the page".

Nature emerges in two of the final three poems: FIRST DAY IN LERWICK and GANNETS ON NOSS. Nature is not to Ezekiel simply the physical, although this emerges in the poems as vivid, energetic and powerful. Rather it is the source of images and symbols which exhilarate the mind and feed the imagination, as in GANNETS ON NOSS:

	From a distance, the gannets are statues,
	posing in rows along the cliff-ledges.

	The stone of the cliff-face as calm
	as the entrance to a temple.

	Tonight, shy and pacing, you practise your speech.
	Now you are repeating it to yourself —